


The War In Her

by sinner_not_a_saint



Category: Jessica Jones (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Anger, Anger Management, Blood and Torture, Boxing & Fisticuffs, Breathplay, Broken Bones, Bruises, Brutal Murder, Canon-Typical Violence, Car Chases, Central Intelligence Agency, Covert Operation, Crime Fighting, Cuddling & Snuggling, Denial of Feelings, Dirty Talk, Drinking to Cope, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Execution, F/M, Family Loss, Female Friendship, Fist Fights, Flashbacks, Fluff and Smut, Forehead Kisses, Fugitives, Government Conspiracy, Government Experimentation, Grief/Mourning, Gunshot Wounds, Hand & Finger Kink, Heavy Drinking, Home Invasion, Implied/Referenced Torture, Injury Recovery, Kink Exploration, Law Enforcement, Lawyers, Leather Jackets, Loss of Parent(s), Loss of Sibling(s), Marine Corps, Medical Experimentation, Military Background, Mutant Powers, Near Death Experiences, Night Terrors, Paramilitary, Partners to Lovers, Porn with Feelings, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Praise Kink, Private Investigators, Protective Frank Castle, Protective Jessica Jones, Revenge, Rough Sex, Self-Hatred, Self-Reflection, Serious Injuries, Sex, Sexual Tension, Slow Burn, Stitches, Strong Female Characters, Therapy, Trust Issues, Vigilantism, Violent Thoughts, Voice Kink, Vulnerability, Women in the Military
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:28:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25872103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinner_not_a_saint/pseuds/sinner_not_a_saint
Summary: Ex-Marine and former paramilitary officer Dylan Emerson has lost everything. Her family was murdered and there was no evidence left behind to point to a killer. So it went cold and the case was never opened again.But there's nothing she won't do in order to ensure that justice is served - as she balances feelings for a damaged man with a tortured past; evades those that wants them both dead; and hunts down the people involved in the murders of their loved ones. It's a dangerous mission and it will cost them everything they have.Including her soul.
Relationships: Frank Castle/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	1. No Need For Absolution

**Author's Note:**

> I had initially posted this under another title called "There Is Nothing Left To Save", but I decided to change the title, as well as things about the character I created. Therefore, I think this will be darker than what I had originally thought up for my previous, and now deleted story, but hopefully this one is well-received.
> 
> Because this story is labeled under both "The Punisher" and "Jessica Jones", it will include characters from both shows. This is my first fanfiction posted on this site so:
> 
> Feel free to comment down below because construction criticism is welcome and appreciated!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is set after the second seasons of Jessica Jones and Daredevil, and before the first season of The Punisher.

* * *

_"Tears are the silent language of grief."_

**_Voltaire_ **

* * *

**January 2016**

* * *

The winter air bit at her nose and cheeks, chilling her down to the bone despite the multiple layers she was bundled up in and the wool-lined leather jacket she wore. Around her, frost-tipped hills expanded as far as the eye could see, not a soul in sight. Drooping gladioli and dark red roses slept along the arch of the grey stone, the words beneath blurring through her agonized tears until they were indecipherable. 

(As if she could ever forget them.

They were carved into stone, after all.)

**~•~●~•~**

_**IN LOVING MEMORY OF** _

_**WILLIAM JOHN EMERSON** _

_**Aug 1957 - Jan 2014** _

_**MIRANDA COPELAND EMERSON** _

_**Apr 1958 - Jan 2014** _

_**NATHAN DANIEL EMERSON** _

_**Oct 1994 - Jan 2014** _

_**KELSEY ISABEL EMERSON** _

_**Feb 1997 - Jan 2014** _

**~•~●~•~**

They had been murdered and the mess of brain matter and blood splattered all over the cream wall of their home was on _her_ hands - hands that already knew war and death yet still dripped crimson no matter how many times she tried to scrub away her sins; and it drove her mad with hate, the terrible acts she'd committed scratching into her skin with each mistake, with each kill, until they are scars that sink too deep to ever be healed.

**_I do not deserve to be absolved._ **

A shot to each skull, four bullets buried.

**_I deserve this agony for the things I've done._ **

_Bruises on skin. Tortured groans from a man that knows nothing. A bullet between the eyes._

She squeezes her eyes shut; tries to staunch the torrent of self-loathing and hatred like it's a wound overflowing with blood, but her mind is something akin to a dam attempting to break from the horror of past deeds. She had done away with her soul so easily, she thinks in retrospect. Followed every order to the _goddamned_ _T_ until the pain of what they were doing to her became too much. Overrode and purged any other instinct except for self-preservation from her damaged, _flayed_ mind.

 _White room. Lab coats._ _Needles. Screaming._

_**Red hands. Teeth. Choking. Blood.**_

As a Marine, she had killed before, when it was either _her_ or _them_ ; when those who died from her bullets were _nameless, faceless_. It didn't make matters any different or make her any less of a killer just because she had fought and killed in the name of her country. But what the CIA had forced her to _do_ , how she had given in without much fight, tormented her to no end. Hatred burned like vitriol in her veins at her cowardice, at her _compliance_ to commit such depravity; but she knew - deep in her bones, she _knew_ \- that refusal meant death. If not her, then those she loved, and she could not let that happen.

But then it had.

After _they_ had experimented on her.

After they had _tortured_ her.

She let out a shuddering breath that ghosted out in front of her into the chilled air, hanging loosely onto the bottle of whiskey as she brought it up to her mouth for a hard pull. The alcohol burned down her throat, acrid but welcome, warmth pooling in her stomach and slowly eroding her liver but she couldn't bring herself to care. Not many would mourn for her if she died, except Jessica and Jack, but she and Jess were the same side of the same fuckin' coin when it came to the despair and loss they both felt and couldn't seem to soldier through, that if she died, Jess would probably drink herself to death too, and then where would they both be?

And Jack certainly had a _thing_ for her - even though those reasons were ones she couldn't even _begin_ to comprehend; and it bothered her that he cared so deeply for her because, in her experience, people had a tendency to die whenever she stuck around too long. She tries not to entertain the idea of her and Jack together, even though she _does_ like him. They served together in Afghanistan for a year and a half and kept her feeling safe, _protected_ , even in instances where safety was never truly guaranteed, and she trusted him implicitly despite her omnipresent mistrust in others. He had always treated her with respect and had been mindful of her boundaries since she found herself at his apartment two years ago - fresh off a bus from Virginia wearing stolen clothes and a pair of boots two sizes too big, the layers of blood from her escape long since washed away by the February rain. He let her in.

It was more than she had hoped.

But she just couldn't do it, didn't have it in her to end it all or _leave_ like she should have from the very beginning. He was something _good_ and she was too damn selfish to let him go, even though she _knew_ she should have.

She also knew she had a job to do, because dammit, she was going to do it; she was going to find every single one of them and put a bullet in their heads. She was going to do it, even if her hands ran with blood at the end of it: even if she died in the process. She needed to, because who else was going to do what needed to be done? It's already been _two_ _years_...

_Too long. No one else. Gotta do it._

**_Kill 'em. Make 'em bleed._ **

Now dark whispers hissed, rattled like the tails of snakes in her head, a ghostly choir of ascent, of _yesyesyes_ that latched onto any stray thoughts that still debated the morality of her decisions, and poisoning, damning them like a legion of parasites.

_Murder is murder, no matter what._

_**It's justice, is what it is.** _

_Torture is wrong._

_**They showed them no mercy.** _

Her thoughts were always in such a constant, vicious battle, and yet she just wanted to drown in that calamitous void of death and never come back up for air. All that agony would die along with her, right, instead of living like a festering, rotten sickness in her blood?

Right? _Right?_

But she couldn't give in to that beckoning darkness and she _needed_ to find vengeance, because Kelsey had been just sixteen and Nathan had been just a few years older, and both had been so full of an exuberance that was extinguished too early; because _fuckin' hell_ they had been just _children_. When she had first been deployed to Afghanistan for the first time, neither of them were in junior high yet, but when they had both been _slaughtered_ , Kelsey hadn't _even graduated_ , and she - she wanted to scream and rage and fuckin' _kill_ the assholes that had taken them away from her. She wanted to bash their brains in, break their bones, electrocute them, flay them alive, and those sick dark thoughts just fuckin' spun around and around in her head like a perverse, debauched chant of **_doit doit doit_** , like it would even come close to cauterizing those fresh wounds that never healed, like it would even do them _justice_ , like it would bring them _back_ -

The whiskey scorched her throat, sent those damning tears falling down so more could collect in their place, the alcohol a pitiful substitute for warmth. She wiped her mouth furiously with the back of her hand and glared at the engraved words of her family's names through the rising tears once more, her gloved hand delving into the pocket of her leather jacket for the crumpled square of plastic film. The photo, frayed at the edges from weeks of wear and abuse, hid behind a small section of newspaper that she had attached to the picture with a paperclip, and she scanned the words quickly, pain burrowing itself deep into her skin.

> _"On January 17th, 2014, the Emerson family was killed in their Virginia home by killers whose identities are still unknown. The victims included sixteen-year-old Kelsey Emerson, a junior at John Marshall High; nineteen-year-old Nathan Emerson, a freshman at University of Virginia; and their parents: attorneys Miranda Copeland and William Emerson. Police have not found any leads in their investigation since the brutal murders occurred._
> 
> _If anyone has any information regarding these crimes, please contact the Richmond Police Department._
> 
> _Published_ January 30, 2014

She let out another trembling breath, feeling her throat close up as she stuffed the small square of newspaper back into her pocket and smoothed out the creases of the worn photo.

It was a picture of them as a family on a lazy summer day at the park. She was twenty-two and she had come home from Afghanistan briefly before she was set to depart again. They had asked some passersby to take their family picture and assumed their places with eight-year-old Kelsey in front of their parents, smiling up at the camera with her pale blue dress and sun-bright beam, her soft face emitting all the sweet innocence of a person so young.

_"Dylan! Can we go get ice cream before we go to the park?" came Kelsey's excited voice as she bounded down the stairs in a pair of beige Uggs and white jeans, wearing a light blue long-sleeved shirt and her chestnut brown hair down around her shoulders, beanie in hand._

_"Now, wait just a minute," their mother chided, green eyes glancing up from her laptop from her spot on the couch. "You'll be back before five, yeah? We have your brother's orchestra concert to get ready for."_

_Chuckling, she slid her Glock into the front waistband of her jeans and walked over to give their mother a kiss on the cheek. "Yeah, Mom. I promise we'll be here early enough to get ready."_

Their mother's head rested on one of their father's broad shoulders, eyes confessing all of the love she felt for their family of five, her ringed hand on Nathan's shoulder, whose dark hair flopped into his shy eyes, which met the camera with an equally timid grin.

_"Ya know," she teased her younger brother, who hid behind the menu at the sight of the girl who had just walked into the diner, his cheeks bursting with color, "you should just ask what's-her-name - Sarah? - to hang out sometime. It's never gonna happen if ya don't go for it."_

_Nathan shook his head quickly, absolutely against the idea of putting himself out there to speak to his crush, due to either his nerves or the fear of rejection - or both. "N-nope, I-I'm good right here, sis."_

_She just laughed, shrugging and deciding to go back to her hamburger and fries and dipping the latter into ketchup, before pointing one red-tipped fry at her brother. "Better man up, is all I'm saying. Before someone else decides to make a move on your girl."_

_At her last few words, Nathan spluttered around his Coke and slid aghast blue eyes to her amused green ones. "She's not my girl!"_

That had been one of her favorite memories of them together because, even though he had ended up dating the girl years later, her brother had never really outgrown that shyness no matter how old he got.

As for her father - a former veteran of the Vietnam War - he had remained hardened, but no less loving in his words and actions. There was no one she looked up to most in this world, even now, even after two years had gone by; and seeing a younger version of herself, tucked into her father's embrace and smiling and so _loved_ , her heart hurts so much that she's not sure she could ever _be_ healed. But sometimes, when she hit rock-bottom, when she fell so hard that she couldn't possibly get back up on her feet, she could hear his voice in her ear, a ghost of a good man, saying:

_Don't you dare give up._

_Stand back up on your feet, soldier. You are not allowed to break, understand?_

Despite being six feet under the earth, he still found a way to haunt her and give her the advice and the strength to keep going. His ghost had guided her through the deserts of Afganistan and tormented her as a wraith in her dreams, nightmares that roused her from sleep to become a thrashing set of sweaty limbs and clammy fingers, her eyes wide and bloodshot and seeing death.

Flashes of her dead family used to play like a film in her subconscious; a grotesque rendition of the bullets finding their mark in each of their foreheads, crashing through bone to penetrate brain. But her mind still continues to play their screams like how she imagined they sounded like, wounded ones that made her blood crawl in her veins and make her hands clamp over her ears to block sounds that could not be ignored, as her family fell like dominoes one after the other.

Stroking the photo lovingly, a hiccuping sob escaped in her throat, utterly raw and broken and anguished. She still couldn't cope with their deaths; it felt like every night was spent tossing and turning because of it, because she had failed to protect them.

There was no agony in the entire _world_ that could equate to the grief and the guilt she carried within her.

* * *

She doesn't sleep. At least, she tries not to - if only to escape the nightmares of _blood death graves_ that plague her mind whenever she _does_ falls prey to the necessity of sleep. It's like a snippet of film that plays constantly on a loop; twisted images that her mind dredges up from dark recesses that always make her shoot awake, a panicked tangle of sweat-soaked limbs caught up in twisted sheets.

Because she knows it's her fault.

The thought makes her sick to her stomach. It takes everything in her to crawl toward the bathroom and make it to the toilet just in time to vomit into the basin, acid in her throat and sweat matting her hair as she trembles from both the cool air from the vent on her heated skin and the feeling of emptying out the contents of her stomach. Jack wakes up to her retching up the alcohol she drowns herself in; rubs warm soothing circles into her back as he holds her hair away from her face; and gathers her up in his arms after to offer comfort the only way he knows how.

But after that, she doesn't go back to sleep. Instead, the threat of those nightmares keeps her awake; has her pushing against her body's need for rest in favor of climbing out of the window and onto the tiny balcony just below so that she can breathe in the fresh air and clear her head.

_In. Out. In. Out._

She finds herself whispering into the night air later, when she knows that he has gone back to bed, the resolve in her voice strengthening her words so that they become hard steel:

_"You'll get your justice. Even if it's the last thing I do."_


	2. Grey Skies and Warmth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writer's block makes it a bit difficult to crank out new chapters (this one took me over a week to write and I apologize for that). Hopefully this second chapter is alright! Feel free to comment down below!

* * *

_"Grey skies are just clouds passing over."_

**_Duke Ellington_ **

* * *

**August 2016**

* * *

It's Sunday, but the skies hanging over the city outside the diner are grey and heavy with the promise of rain, and her bruised fingers cradle the steaming mug of coffee despite its scalding heat: knuckles sore and cracked, the gauze still stained a rusty sort of crimson and the bandages left unchanged from the previous night's fight. She doesn't mind the pain all that much, though, but her busted lip had stung like a _bitch_ when she had sipped her coffee, making her snarl softly in her throat and gingerly dip the tip of her tongue into the cut on her lip.

 _Fucking Petrov_ , she thinks. The Russian is one of the few opponents she looks forward to fighting, as he's both lean and strong with an admittedly attractive face (very _Ivan Drago,_ if she's being completely honest) and his striking blue eyes and built frame. Andrei Petrov is physically imposing, towering over her by a few inches and always looking as if he could crush someone under his signature black boots, but he's a teddy bear beneath his rough and tough exterior; she knows that based on the sappy lovestruck look he gets in his eyes and the way he cuddles her close to his chest after her every victory and near-failure. She hasn't lost once.

But the well-placed hit had caught them both by surprise; usually he remained focused on attacking her midsection, which is part of the reason why her ribs ache like a _motherfucker_ and she's pretty certain that her ribs are halfway to being broken, if the burst of supernovas across her middle are any indication. That punch to the face had made her seen _stars_ \- though he'd almost won too, if it hadn't have been for the guilty expression that overtook his features and the swift right kick she'd aimed at his knee in retaliation that had toppled him to the mat and gave her an in - and it had taken every ounce of her strength to subdue him and capture the win.

Muay Thai had put a devastating amount of power behind her punches and kicks, tripling the strength that was already built in her toned arms and legs from years as a Marine and in the gym; and the doctors at the facility she had escaped from had modified her at some molecular or genetic level to enhance and strengthen her body. As far as she could tell, she was engineered to be able to endure outstanding amounts of pain far beyond the normal human threshold; to assess any and all situations; and to overcome the restrictive boundaries of morality. She was never built to be a hero of humanity, but was instead tortured into becoming a tool of destruction.

Why they decided to murder her entire family after having trained and weaponized her is beyond her. One would think that someone capable of such destruction would be feared and respected by those that _made_ her, but common sense was not a universal trait - although it _should_ be. Both the lab and the CIA did their part in crafting her into a brutal assassin by forcing her to withstand torture techniques and months of intrusive lab tests that were meant to turn her into the perfect soldier; her body pushed to adapt to extreme conditions of torment and her mind coerced to become greatly desensitized to the agony.

 _Electricity lanced through her veins like a thousand bolts of lightning, an everlasting and terrible hellfire running rampant, charged, in her blood._

Her dreams are always violent. Sometimes, she's back overseas, where the land rattled with explosions like the feet of Titans and where her comrades were blown sky-high and scattered to the winds in pieces. It's a sight that she can never unsee; one that's seared into her retinas and her mind's eye for the remainder of her years. She had patched up her fellow soldiers the best she could when they were injured, but the memory of Lance Corporal Trevor Manning - who had just turned twenty-three and had a heart of gold - stepping on that land mine and dying how he did haunted her seven years later.

Then, she's in that white room strapped down to the operating table while doctors extract the blood from her veins and marrow from her bones; as they implant metal into her spinal cord and fix the damage done to her body and put her back together like a machine. But then she paints that room red, her hands dripping filthy and wet with the sin of murder - lab coats in pools of blood, the equipment tossed and shattered, skin stuck between her teeth from when she had ripped someone's throat out - and she can still feel that savage pride she felt in that moment like the feeling never truly left.

**_They wanted a monster? Now they have one._ **

She relives her worst moments over and over again, the times in which she interrogated foreign agents that the CIA had captured that began the ruthless investigation of _who what when where why_ _?_ and always ended with the click of a trigger and the sound of a silenced bullet. Sometimes it takes days or weeks, but they break. They always do.

And now she's in New York, two and a half years having flown by since the last time she stepped foot on a black site, her methods unnecessary but never forgotten. She has no use for the skills she had honed, as most nights are spent either in the bottom of a bottle or in the center of a ring and her days are spent nursing her injuries and horrendous hangovers from draining shot after shot of whiskey dry. Some days are better than others though, and she finds herself helping Jessica and tracking down ghosts of her own, rather than day-drinking like she used to do before she began working with a private investigator part-time. She doesn't torture foreign operatives in shady black sites anymore; she can no longer get lost in the violence like she used to, where the waters were murky and there were no lines that wouldn't be crossed.

_"You need to tell me what it is that you know, or else things will end very badly for you," she murmured softly in German, speaking to the young man whose resolve has not budged. He glared at her through the one eye that has not been swollen shut by her fist._

_"Geh zum Teufel," he spat, blood spraying from the cut in his lip and onto her boot. Her veins boiled, rage simmering just beneath her skin at the insult as she turned to the collection of serrated blades laid out along the metal table to her right. A grisly grin curls her mouth._

_"Oh, I'll meet you there, sweetheart. Don't you worry about me."_

She knows that side of her will never fade, not since they had so vehemently stoked that sinister darkness in her to become an inferno of heat and wrathful destruction. It is forever mended to her very soul, as eternal as time itself. Perhaps she likes the darkness. When she makes her money with violence, what other conclusion can she arrive at? Her entire body protests in pain, from the roots of her hair down to the tips of her toes, and she knows that getting up from the booth will only aggravate her ribs.

The reflection of herself in the mirror at Alias Investigations that morning, dressed in a bra and a pair of boxers with all of the damage Petrov had inflicted upon her body on full display, did not look pretty. Even Jess had let out a curse, telling her that she looked like shit as the other woman ran the pads of her fingers over a clusterfuck of ugly bruises that exploded over her skin in bursts of purple, black and blue. Malcolm had taken one look at the abused state of her body and gasped, shock written all over his face, before he was covering his eyes to shield himself from her immodesty.

And she knows she still looks like hell hours later, even with her body covered up in the t-shirt and KISS sweatshirt she wore, the tight black jeans she had managed to wriggle into, and the blue cap she had pulled low over her eyes to hide the bruises and the split lip on her face. The waitress, a sweet redhead named Anna whose blue eyes had looked her over with matronly concern to ask her what she wanted from the menu, brings her order within twenty minutes, arms laden with chocolate chip pancakes, waffles, hash browns with diced ham and melted cheese, and a bowl of fruit on the side. Her mouth waters at the meal, her stomach rumbling softly.

Anna places the plates down on the table in front of her in an arrangement that allows easy access to all of the food, her pancakes set directly in her line of sight and the rest circling the buttered soft stack. She moves her coffee near the ketchup, which stands tall next to a metal box of napkins, and adjusts herself in her seat to make sure she can reach everything, and she sends the waitress a small smile, who returns the gesture kindly.

"Is there anything else I can get for you before I go on my break?" She asks, her light and airy voice soothing to her ears. Dylan looks at her, assessing the light dusting of freckles splashed across her nose and the softness in her expression. She looks like she's in college, which surprises her because she hasn't met many college students working in restaurants that are as diligent and sweet as her, and her red hair is tied back in a high tail save for a few stray curls that frame her face.

She's not sure what it is about the girl but she _likes_ her. Maybe it's the fact that she seems like she'd be about how old Kelsey would be if she were alive or because she wants to pretend, if even for a few moments, that she's just a normal person and isn't a killer deep in her soul.

Dylan shakes her head to both get rid of the silly idea and as an answer to the girl's question.

"No, but...do y' wanna sit down with me?" she asks, gesturing to the seat opposite her with her fork. Anna hesitates for a moment, blue eyes holding hers with a hint of confusion and searching her green ones quickly. She seems to find what she's looking for - or rather, the lack of what she was searching for - and slips into the seat across from her shy yet unafraid.

She smiles inwardly.

Taking a bite out of the cheese-lathered hash browns and stabbing a few ham chunks with her fork for good measure, she nearly moans from how good it tastes - like it's the best damn hash browns she's ever had in her life. "Damn, that's good. Give the cook my regards. This is fuckin' delicious."

Anna smiles gently, reaching a hand up to slide an errant curl behind her ear again, and nods - a blush in the girl's cheeks at her blunt words. "Sure, yeah."

* * *

"So. Dylan. Where did you get the, uh...all the, uh...?" Anna Boyd stammers, not sure how to ask, and plucks a grape from the small bowl of fruit in order to give herself something to do.

"A fight," she answers simply and, amused, watches Anna's slim eyebrows furrow at being told something so obvious. She chuckles, cutting the waffle into small equal portions just how she was taught when she was younger, and decides to indulge her questions - at least for the time being. "I'm a kickboxer. 'S how I make my money. Couldn't think of anything else to do. I'm a veteran; wanted to do somethin' exciting. Workin' a nine t' five jus' didn't seem fulfillin', y'know?"

The girl's eyes widen at the declaration that she used to be in the military and she leans in slightly, excitement evident in her posture and mixing with the curiosity shining in her baby blues. "What branch did you serve under?"

Anna's eyebrows pinch, the gears in her head turning over and over, and her blue eyes trace over the lines of her body as if the answer will suddenly yield itself to her inquisitive gaze. Dylan smirks and continues to wolf down the delicious food, making sure to chew so she doesn't choke. The meal is the best breakfast she's eaten in days, everything laid out on the table before her cooked to perfection.

"Mm, the Marine Corps," she replies before dipping a blueberry into the maple syrup she'd poured all over her waffle. "About six years."

"Any family?"

The question startles her, though it shouldn't have; makes her freeze for a moment - a tiny, imperceptible moment in which her fork and knife pause midair and the weight of her loss barrels into her chest like a load of bricks that stops as quickly as it had started. She settles on shaking her head, but can't bring herself to divulge any further than a _"once"_ that makes Anna sigh in what she can only comprehend as sympathy and decide not to press harder.

"What about you?" Dylan inquires, lowering her head to shovel more food into her mouth. "Family? College? Have y' given any thought about a major?"

Anna smiles, equally grateful for the gentle nudge into a conversation of easy waters as she is.

"I'm an only child. My mom works in interior design and my dad teaches English at the high school I graduated from. Just started the fall term at Stony Brook as a junior a few days ago, where I'm training as a paramedic," she informs her proudly before snagging yet another grape from their shared bowl with a grin.

Whistling low through her teeth, Dylan leans back in the booth, both thoroughly impressed and intrigued. "An EMT, huh? Shit, ain't that an aspiration. The job sounds like it'd suit ya. Couldn't be me though. Never was good at anything science; the most I can do is fix a car an' stitch myself up an' that's about it."

"You can teach me the mechanics of a car all damn day and I still won't understand," the younger woman sighs, then chews the fruit she has between her fingers, her throat bobbing when she swallows. "But I swear, memorizing the different names and uses of various medicines is like learning a whole new language. Not exactly easy, but I study hard to make sure everything sticks."

"That's exactly why I ain't cut out for it. Screw memorization," she scoffs, throwing her hands up in the hair, and Anna laughs - a soft, tinkling sound that makes the corners of her busted tip up slightly, something warm expanding in her chest that she can't quite explain. All she knows is that, for the first time in a long time, she actually feels . . .

Normal.

It's a strange feeling, but she finds that she welcomes it all the same.


End file.
